ygjb
Oh shit.
Damn. I don't have grandkids yet but ok.
I didn't come to HN to confront my own mortality and age ;P
Those aren't museum artefacts, it's just retro.
Get off my lawn.
1. See a vuln domain reported, clone the site. 2. Wait for it to expire and snag it. 3. Republish the site with malware 4. Watch people dither about domain names and stuff instead of taking time to fix things.
GitHub.io domains, workers.dev domains, etc are all free domains.
Clever use and abuse of some startups can get you a free domain with a signup package that you can subsequently transfer out, but those are harder to find these days.
Seriously, the bad guys figure this out all the time.
The answer to Why is Congress concerned with details like this? is that the Supreme Court of the United States made it their concern by rejecting an established practice of deferring to expert regulators instead of electable people who probably lack the relevant knowledge and experience.
Turning off automatic software updates requires that you actively stay on top of what's installed and what's running, including patching with discipline to make sure your computer doesn't remain vulnerable. On the other hand, automatic updates is seen as writ large by software developers to install what they want without a clear and meaningful choice by users by bundling new features. See Google's integration of Gemini Nano in 2024 as an example.
I wonder what could possibly go wrong by setting the precedent for the state to execute people by firing squad on national news.
For me, boilerplate isn't scaffolding out getters and setters, or deferring to templated code generation; using refactoring tools that have been baked into IDEs or third party tools have been available for about 20 years deal with all of those nicely.
On the other hand, the "boilerplate" to stand up a secure web service with appropriate monitoring and scaling capabilities is a fair bit of work when you know that the immediate first users are enterprise businesses.
Building a service that meets or exceeds industry compliance requirements (internal or otherwise) is a lot of work! My harness, skills, and SOPs are set up such that if I spin up a new web-dev project, it gets all of the accessibility, internationalization, observability, authentication and authorization capabilities I would expect, appropriate to the tier. There is a lot of work done to build and implement those at the front end of a project, which I could skip over for experimentation, but for actual, deliverable work, it is a huge accellerator. In addition, by having that scaffolding and boilerplate in place, and a few skills and SOPs to support future feature growth, the agentic coding tools build with them in mind, and wire everything up as they go.
It doesn't replace the need to do the testing and validation, but it sure does break me out of the cycle of "fuck it ship" that takes over when I have my developer hat on, and the "holy shit, burn it all down and start over" that takes over when I put my security engineer hat back on.
shrug YMMV.
I don't trust any of the hyperscalers to place me as a user first, I expect them to guide me into a stall, strap on a feedbag, and start the value extraction process while they build the meatrix[1] around me.
I want tools like Muse, and Meta Glasses, Google Gemini and a horizontally integrated AI agent, but I want it on my terms, where I am in control and accountable, and without a layer of data collection and harvesting on top of it.
Fortunately I am skilled enough to assemble most of what I want, but I fear a world where people who lack the skills and resources I have available have no choice but to onboard and give up control in order to remain competitive, employed, and connected in the world to come :(
Do you think the world is closer to or more distant from large scale global conflict today than it was 10 years ago, or even 3 years ago?
giving that code as a prompt to Claude yields:
Worked for 5s · done 8:30 AM
10 PRINT "Hello World"; 20 GOTO 10
Still looping. Anything you'd like me to do for real?
After that, I gave it a second instruction: create a GW-basic interpreter in python
It's 5 characters longer, and gives me the interpreter I need to run the basic code (actually not - I had to change the Basic code to have a second line for the loop in GW-Basic; I should have used a more recent basic, but I actually wrote a GW-Basic interpreter many years ago).
It's especially the case as more non-Americans look to self hosted models and domestic cloud inference providers using open models that the US providers who are still leading the charge need to drastically drop their prices and find a path to profitability in order to maintain their lead and retain the advantage they had as AI turns into a commodity (which is happening faster than I think even the frontier labs initially predicted).
There is as much to criticize about American hyper scalers and AI labs and the lack of interest in helping humanity or contributing to open source, but that might not be as popular an opinions on this site.
Is it evil to introduce terms and conditions that restrict how you expect your users to use your product? No, it's probably more hypocritical than evil; I don't think my parents telling me not to smoke while they struggled with addiction was evil, but it sure didn't model the best behaviour.
Is it evil to lobby government to curtail the freedoms of individuals to protect your business model? Yeah, probably; in most cases I believe that reducing consenting adults freedoms is usually a pretty evil act.
Microsoft is guilty of both, but I prefer to save Evil to describe actions that actively cause harm, either physically, mentally, emotionally, or in terms of harming the freedoms that people enjoy, especially if that choice to cause harm is economically motivated.
I'm not advocating on behalf of Bill Gates or Microsoft, just on clear terminology so that we can focus on actual evil behaviour versus consenting adults entering into a valid contract for mutual benefit.
There is a proliferation of sovereign models under development specifically to address data sovereignty, and a loss of performance is absolutely acceptable over the risk that a once ally will turn adversarial, or a foreign business stops serving what has become critical infrastructure.
You can act as upset as you want, I am more concerned about the impact to the world around us than I am about hurt feelings on a tech discussion forum.
I'm not entirely sure why you are so upset with me, but I assure you, it's not cosplay. My family lives on the west coast, and are going to be significantly impacted by climate change. My family back east lives in rural Manitoba (southern and northern), and their farms have been impacted by poor harvests due to weather and climate issues. My friends and family in northern Manitoba were evacuated due to forest fires last summer, and other friends in the BC interior were as well.
It's not performative concern and it's not revolutionary, it's just exhaustion from watching people deny and tone police discussions about something having real, human impacts. People will starve to death because of crop failures happening today, and its going to get worse :(
Sure. There are weaknesses in the study, it doesn't change the fact that there was a significant increase in the number of deaths.
Hiding behind the claims that studies of complex systems are not completely valid because of a lack of rigor in the process or a weakness in the data are easy to overlook when governments around the world (including mine in Canada) are routinely fudging the numbers to achieve political goals.
People are dying from climate change in record numbers, and it's going to get a lot worse, and criticizing the quality of the studies does absolutely nothing helpful.
If I am wrong, I apologize, but politeness and tone policing to shut down discussion of crises is a recurring problem in society.
The comment I responded to was tone policing for crassness instead of actually contributing to the discussion.
Would it have been better to point out there has been a Russo-Ukraine wars worth of deaths from heat waves each year since 2022?
Or a Rwandan Civil Wars worth of deaths projected in the next year?
Or a Holocaust worth of deaths over the next decade?
What does it take to get people to listen and take it seriously?
Not for nothing but I am growing lemons and coffee beans in Vancouver, BC, and I only need to bring them in for about 2 months a year. What that actually means is that people are already evaluating how we will relocate crops (luxury and essential) to other climates.
What about when major crops like wheat, corn, rice, and beans fail around the world?
The earth is the only place in the universe right now where humans can survive at our current technology level, and we are destroying that ecosystem at an alarming rate. We depend on the entire planets ecosystem for our survival, and even if technology somehow could let us survive ecological collapse, a humanist approach to the environment is tantamount to burning the boat we are sailing on to keep warm.
The death toll from Hiroshima was between 90-160 thousand people. The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.
Add in crop failure, ecosystem collapses, and other unexpected disasters, and it's easy to see why.
It might be crass, but it's mostly poor people and poor countries that are going to be affected.
They are not turning a profit, and aside from enterprise token billing, every other offering they have is a loss leader. In order to flip that around they need to drive down the cost of inference significantly, either through massive compute improvements, more efficient or lower cost models, and either one lowers the barrier to entry for local and/or private cloud inference for open models. The moat established by the expertise in model training is effectively dissolving as they approach recursive self improvement because any mechanism that prevents model distillation effectively reduces the quality and utility of the models, so each improved model makes their competitors better by default if they want to realize those gains.
The reason for the pivot to control and regulation seems to be more about erecting an artificial moat in their market, and having these technologies controlled or highlighted as supply chain risks will continue to drive investments in alternatives, especially in other countries where data sovereignty and domestic tech has become a priority given the last decade of the US dominated tech industry.
I don't think that AI is going to go away, but I think the future of AI in the next several years looks alot like massive overfunded foundational model providers collapsing, their employees launching dozens or hundreds of direct competitors, and the leading hyperscalers buying up datacenter capacity the way they bought up dark fiber 20 years ago.
We are almost ready for our full launch, but definitely interested in getting feedback! I posted my take on here last week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49716388